


In the Graveyard is Where we Met

by jimkirkk



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M, ghost au, major character death (background)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 00:48:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 6,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1490557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jimkirkk/pseuds/jimkirkk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They didn't meet in the Graveyard, <i>per say<i>. They met in a coffee shop on the corner of 3rd Street. But it started in the Graveyard.</i></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

The blood coursed through his veins, his heart beat in time with the man’s. There were a spark of adrenaline as the man touched him. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears, hear how his heart beat; a distant _thump- th-thump. _  
__

He could feel the heat of the room, the changes in the temperature, everything was hypersensitive. Noises were too loud for his ears, touches too much for his nerves. He could feel his chest rising and falling with breath. His lungs expanding and deflating with the intake of oxygen and expulsion of carbon dioxide.  


He shifted his fingers, watching them move. He felt them stiffen and loosen with different positions, watched as they bent and contorted, feeling coming back to them slowly. He wiggled his toes, twitched his legs and arms.  


The pain, when it came, was agonizing. Excruciating, stabbing pain. It was sharp, like the scent of freshly cut grass. It stung and burned and it sent shivers up his spine. With each breath, it sprung through his chest, with every movement is shot through his back. Parts of his hair were stiff with dried blood.  


The dripping sensation down his back tickled and made him shift positions, trying to find relief from the warm, wet feeling crawling towards the floor with gravity.  


He could feel the man rushing around him, but couldn’t see him. His eyes were adjusting to the dark lighting; pupils dilating and shrinking like they were confused as to what was going on as the lighting changed with the flickering of the light.  


Something pressed against his back and he gasped sharply when it began to sting. He blinked and turned his head, finally catching sight of the man.  


He shut his eyes quickly, screwing his lids together tightly as the memories crashed down.  


Everything rushed in behind his eyelids, flashing colors and words and movement. Frightening scenes of abuse that hurt to think about, walks through the graveyard with the man currently by his side, his mom’s suicide, his brother leaving, _Tarsus _. Seeing his own body in the morgue, Frank chaining him up in the basement, his dad’s voice calling to him. The man, grinning widely at something that had been said. The man approaching him in a coffee shop, the man smiling at him, laughing, the man standing in the meadow, head turned towards him, his hair a light brown, almost blond in the sunlight. The man, over and over, happy memories to combat the bad ones.  
__

He reached out to grab the man’s sleeve as he opened his eyes. There was something wrapped around his midsection, and something warm around his shoulders. The man looked at him, face full of concern and hands stained with something red.  


He saw his blood on the man’s hands, the concern on the man’s face, the tentative smile that spread across the man’s face at the feel of a heartbeat.  


He watched as the man embraced him loosely so as not to hurt him, and it hit him.  


_I’m alive. ___


	2. The Graveyard (Ch. 1)

Cold darkness surrounded him as his eyes drooped shut. He was no longer able to keep them open, the darkness invaded his sight and enveloped his body, turning it the shade of the night. It took too much strength to move and it took more to continue to breathe. It took all the energy he didn’t have to raise his head and look around the room for the last time.  


He tried to think back to when he was little, but realized he couldn’t remember _being _little. He couldn’t remember when he was four, he couldn’t remember- what was it? It was all fading away, memories he could once remember in vivid color dwindled to black and white and disappeared. They became cold, empty slots in his head. He had the amusing thought that cobwebs would grow there now that there was nothing to occupy the space. Spiders would weave their webs through his skull once his brain was gone too.  
__

He was tired. Everything was vanishing and he couldn’t see anymore and every breath rattled in his chest and sent vibrant red pain through his body. The blood dripped and oozed and gushed from different places on his body, all joining the stream the led to the puddle under and next to him. He was emaciated, enervated, exhausted; he supposed he was dead beat. He was everything and nothing and possibly becoming something. He needed to sleep. _Sleep. That sounds nice. _He let his eyes close against the darkness, let his limbs numb against the pain. He let it all fade away, taking him with it.  
__

His last thought was one of regret for a life taken too soon, a life that had never deserved to be lived. A life wasted and given to a soul that was bound to die too early.  


James Tiberius Kirk died on April 8th, 2249. He was sixteen.  


\-------

When he woke, it was cold.  


It was a different kind of cold than at the house, it was a numb thrill of negative temperature strewn throughout his body like christmas lights, blinking in his arms and legs and torso. He couldn’t exactly feel the cold, but he could feel the fact that it was there. He could feel the dull throbbing of it.  


He could hear, and see, and feel, but it was all numb. Muffled and too loud at the same time.  


He had the dizzying thought that he was still alive, until he looked around.  


He was in a graveyard.  


The bright green grass was crushed by footprints in places, dirt tracked around the field like a trail of breadcrumbs. Eroded gray stones peppered the yard, stating with a proud sadness who was buried there. Who had died when and of what, in some cases.  


Shadows were cast on the ground, through his limbs. _Through? _  
__

He looked up to the thing casting the shadows. It was an old, leaning dogwood tree. Crooked, and twisted trunk, with long, sloping, bent branches crisscrossing over each other.  


Under the tree was a stark white stone. The lettering was clear, precise. It was new.  


There were colorful flowers carved into the right bottom and top left corners. Vibrant reds, bright yellows and oranges, deep blues, the sweet green of the leaves. Of course, he could only imagine the colors, new and brilliant, so unlike everything else in the graveyard. Everything was in black and white, dull grays and creamy ivories, deep blacks and clear whites.  


But he had been to this graveyard before.  


He read the lettering, and thought back to before he woke up, before he opened his eyes again.  


He was dead, and here he laid, remembered only by a stone and the man who had killed him.  


He could move freely and he could speak, but he didn’t breathe. His heart didn’t beat. There was no blood running through his veins. There were no sounds of a working body. He could still feel emotion, even though his brain was gone. He wondered how it worked.  


He saw others milling around, some who looked like him, others who were more…. solid.  


The ones who walked on the ground, the ones with the beating hearts. They were alive and well and visiting the graveyard. The ones who looked towards his grave saw nothing but that.  


Some smiled, some looked at the dates sadly, doing the mental math. They had known it would only be a matter of time till he was dead and gone. He didn’t like the ones who seemed happy about it.  


One man he saw didn’t live in Riverside, or at least he had never seen the man.  


This man walked up to his grave, knelt in front of it, dragged his fingers over the lettering, over the flowers. The man noticed the dates and the name and he saw a tear fall down the man’s face and hit the grass. This man did not know him. This man should not have been crying at his grave. Unless…. unless the man _had _known him.  
__

He couldn’t remember anything except his death. How it had happened, where it had happened, who had done it. He didn’t remember his life before it, and he didn’t remember anyone who had been involved in it. He supposed that was part of death.  


Then the man looked at him.  


“Jim?”  


He gaped at the man and hid behind the tree. The man _had _known him. This man knew him.  
__

“It’s okay, I won’t hurt you. I just want to talk.”  


“You- you know me?” He tried in a raspy voice, like his vocal cords weren’t used to being used.  


Jim was scared of the man. The man had dark hair that was going gray, laugh lines and little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. The man looked like he was nice, like he could be trusted. But Jim didn’t know him, or he didn’t think he had known him.  


All he knew was that his name was James Tiberius Kirk, he was born on March 22, 2233, and that he died on April 8th, 2249. He was sixteen.


	3. Familiarity (Ch. 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm gonna say expect short chapters for this one. they seem to fit better than the longer ones.

“Jim, my name is Christopher Pike. I’m an old family friend.”  


 _Christopher Pike_. It _sounded_ familiar, but Jim didn’t know what memories the name connected with, if they connected with any. He didn’t remember. The man - Christopher Pike- told him the bits and pieces of his life that he’d been a part of. There was a lot of shit, apparently. It seemed to Jim that there was an awful lot of shit no matter where he went, be it home, or a graveyard. The graveyard felt more like home than his house had.  


George Kirk, his father, had died on the day of Jim’s birth. He was a hero, and Jim was buried under the tree that George had planted it when his father, Tiberius Kirk, had died. George Kirk had been Captain of starship for 12 minutes. In that 12 minutes he had saved over 800 lives, including those of Jim and his mother. Winona Kirk, Jim’s mother, had remarried to Frank Mahler, the man who had killed him. She had been Captain of a starship, too. For two years. She withdrew her commission to Starfleet when Jim was three, and she had committed suicide when Jim was four.  


Jim couldn’t remember her. He wanted to. Wanted to be able to.  


Jim had had a brother, Sam, who had left when Jim was eleven. It was the same year Jim had gone to Tarsus.  


He knew what Tarsus was. He just didn’t know why he knew. Tarsus IV had been a planet colonized by Starfleet. Disaster hit in the form of famine, and the Governor had used his personal theories of eugenics to handle the situation. He ordered the deaths of four thousand colonists, so that the other four thousand would live. But he didn’t stop at four thousand, and he didn’t stop at executions.  


If Jim had had blood, it would have been boiling.  


Christopher Pike told him about Frank and about the things he had done. He told him about the good things and the bad things. He told him about the different things that he had done, the felonies committed, the attempts at running away. Jim had not had a good life. That was something he knew. He had not had a life at all, really. How he had been living could not truly have been called living.  


Christopher Pike told him about his mother and his father and his brother. About himself and the people he had let into his life. About school, and the things he had been learning. Those had come back, but the rest hadn’t.  


Christopher Pike told him that it wouldn’t.  


Christopher Pike also told him about ghosts. And people who could see ghosts.  


People who could see ghosts had minds finely tuned to the spiritual world. They could sometimes see auras, or memories. Some of them could read minds, if their talent was trained. Others could see the soul.  


Souls with nowhere else to go were called ghosts. They were the ones who stayed, who tarried. The ones forgotten by everyone but themselves. The ones who had died in violent or unjust ways. Suicide. Murder. War. Drowning. No matter the cause, they were the ghosts. They were the lingerers.


	4. Unremarkable (Ch.3)

_Winona Kirk, 2203-2237 _. That was all the gravestone said. No cause, no birthday, no deathday. There was nothing other than a name and two years. She had been 34.  
__

The gravestone was a deep, melancholy gray, indistinguishable from the rest. It was not special. It was blank, listless. It was a marker of a life ended. Six feet under the dirt in an equally unremarkable coffin, laid a woman’s decomposed, or decomposing body.  


Unremarkable.  


It seemed everything in the graveyard was unremarkable. Either gray or green or brown. Specks of lighter colors where flowers laid upon the graves, or flags waved in the soil.  


Unremarkable.  


Jim was the same. His life hadn’t been. His life was chalked full of tragedy and woe, of hatred and prejudice. His life had been half-lived and painful. His life had been remarkable in the worst ways.  


He had experienced being invisible while alive. He was experiencing it still. The difference was that now he was truly invisible.  


He knew he could be seen. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be.  


If they looked, they’d see something broken. A soul with no light inside. A boy with a hollow chest.  


He had felt hollow before.  


It ached and sparked thoughts that flew around his head like birds. It made his lungs feel tight and his limbs feel heavy. It hurt more than any injuries Frank had ever caused.  


This was different. He didn’t feel heaviness or tightness anymore. He didn’t feel pain. He felt numb, dissatisfied. He felt artificial.  


He felt. It wasn’t something new, but it was different. Feeling. Scientifically, it wasn’t possible without a working brain. Something dead would not feel anything, physical or otherwise. But he could. Ghosts could.  


They wandered. They lurked. They haunted. They felt deeply and painfully. They carried the burdens of their unremembered memories. Of their deaths.  


They were burdens on the world as well. They didn’t eat. They didn’t sleep. They did not live. They were stuck. They were invisible, unremarkable. They were the browns and the grays and the greens.  


They were woeful, and tragic, and painfully aware of the world around them. They could speak but no one would hear. They were dead to the world in all senses.  


Unremarkable, invisible, hollow.  


Three words never seemed like they could describe a person. But ghosts were not people.  


Jim Kirk had three words to his name, always did. Troublemaker. Mistake. Ghost.  


He was a ghost of his father. After his mother passed, a ghost of her too. A legacy to the memories of two people he couldn’t remember.  


Maybe it was better that way.


	5. The Universe: Concerning Life and Death (Ch. 4)

Memories were generally foreign to ghosts. Ghosts, who didn’t breathe, didn’t smell, didn’t taste, and therefore didn’t eat. They didn’t sleep, they didn’t even blink. There was no blood coursing through Jim’s veins, his heart didn’t beat. His brain was as dead as the rest of him.  


It was a miracle he could even have coherent thoughts, that he could feel emotion. He could remember his death, he could feel the cold, the dark. It closed around the peripheries of his vision and made his brain bleary and confused. It lurked in the cubicles of the forgotten memories. It spun the cobwebs through the far corners of his mind. It was the shadows. It was the night itself. Death was a beautiful dark blanket of eternal night, unlit stars scattered somewhere in the sky.  


As your vision failed you began to see them, little silver specs in the air as the black surrounded you and crushed your chest, pushed the air out of your lungs and forced shadows into your heart. It kneaded your limbs to jelly and froze your flesh. And just when you thought it was over, when your eyes fell closed and you felt your last breath rattle in your chest, the pain came. It arched your body into a perfect semi-circle, made you contort and curl into a fetal position while you took another breath, hoping it would _finally _be the last. And then the darkness fell.  
__

And then you woke up.  


Jim could remember that. Most of the time, it was all a ghost could remember. Faces of people he once knew, he could no longer recall. The people who walked through the graveyard did not look familiar. They were alien to him. He had forgotten.  


If months passed, he was unable to tell. Black and white, night and day, there was no way for him to tell when it all bled together. Monday to the next Sunday, everything was blurred. Days to weeks, weeks to months, months to years, the only way he could tell was when Pike came back.  


It was always a happy birthday and a see you next year. A brief conversation about the past year. He knew Pike cared. He hated the conversations. He didn’t care about the news or the deaths or the births. He was dead. There was nothing for him in the press.  


He was dead. It was weird to think about. It became a constant revelation as he floated through the town.  


He had been dead. For two years. He had turned eighteen the past March.  


He had never thought he’d be dead at eighteen.  


Come to think of it, he hadn’t thought he would’ve made it to sixteen. Explains why he just weeks after.  


The Universe had it out for him. He had survived the Kelvin. He had survived Frank. He had survived Tarsus. And then Frank had gotten him.  


He was never supposed to have been alive. He hadn’t deserved the life he had been given, and the Universe had taken it back.  


Seemed the Universe always took what rightfully belonged to it. Life, death. They were just words. The Universe granted each, and had the power to take each back. The Universe was the only being with the power over life and death, and it lacked mercy. The Universe was cruel and unforgiving. It was cold and dark. It was death itself.


	6. Death (Ch. 5)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> excuse that terrible pun that i should (will) probably get rid of

Grace. Jim was unaccustomed to the notion of being graceful. He was inherently clumsy. As a ghost, you were nothing but graceful. You floated around, you could not bump into anything. There was no way to trip and fall when you could float through something.  


As a ghost he was graceful. He could twirl around and around like a fucking ballerina and he couldn’t even get dizzy. He supposed he was graveful, rather than graceful. He was dead, after all. Grace was something death seemed to lack.  


He remembered the spasming and the convulsing before his final breath leaked out of his lungs, painful bit after painful bit.  


Yes, grace was something death lacked. Death lacked the finesse. It could be quick, or long, drawn out. Though death was never quick. Each second felt like an eternity. An angry red blot in a normally grey life. It was harrowing.  
The cold of winter was not like the cold of death. Death was a dark, icy blanket. Winter was fluffy and frigid. Death burned and stung with each movement, each agonizing breath came with the bite of an inner chill. As your body gave in to the grip of Death’s rimy fingers, needles poked at you, they drove into your skin and made you arch up in pain while trying to stay still, all your muscles randomly tensing and relaxing. Death was cold and heartless, it payed no mind to mercy.  


Jim thought about death an awful lot these days. He lived in a graveyard, he was saxicolous. It was hard not to ponder what exactly Death was. Man or woman, non-binary or otherwise. Adult, child, adolescent, infant, or elder. Death was a non-being. It was not a human, it was not alien. It was not anything at all, really. Death was what they called the phenomenon of a person’s organs failing. Death was not a person, it was a thing. An idea. Death was not necessarily real, according to some philosophers.  


Jim disagreed. Death was decidedly real. From what he had been told, it could be reversed. But it was real. He had felt his organs cease to work and he had felt his blood ooze out of his body. His had felt his skin rip to tatters, his bones crack and bruise. He had felt his life leave his body. Death was very, very real.


	7. Concerning Life and Life in Death (Ch. 6)

It was said a ghost could be recalled to life. There was a certain process to it all, a certain circumstance. The body had to be intact, first of all. Most ghosts stayed ghosts because of that one condition.  


There was a native american ritual that went by the name of soul retrieval. If a shaman suspected soul loss, he or she would go on a journey to retrieve the soul pieces, and would return and breathe the soul back into the body. This was one of the ways a ghost could be placed back inside their body.  


The second way was the cliche that so many disney movies ended with. True love’s kiss. Most people didn’t believe in ghosts. Usually, the ones who did couldn’t see them. Most ghosts could never find someone who could see them. They floated aimlessly along, knowing that their body was decaying, six feet under the ground in a wooden box. There was no naive hope. There was despair. There was grief. Most ghosts would wail at the thought.  


Sometimes, a ghost would be brought back. They would come alive and their body would heal and they would live out the rest of their life. Those who had died unfairly, or as infants. Jim had died unfairly. He should have died as an infant.  
After two years, Jim was sure he would not be brought back. His body would be full of maggots and the flesh would be eaten away by god knows what.  


He had hope, despite that fact. Love was a foreign feeling to him, but he imagined it was possible. Possible for him to fall in love. He knew it wasn’t possible for someone to fall in love with him. But still, he hoped. Hoped that someone could find a shaman to breathe his soul back into his body before it rotted completely away.  


Saxicolous. Everyone in the graveyard was. They were saxicolous. They lived and grew under rocks. Except they didn’t. They were dead, they no longer grew. They no longer lived. They no longer hoped.  


Jim was the youngest in the graveyard. The others looked on him with pity. They asked no questions, they spoke no words. They avoided him. They looked on him with distaste because of his hope.  


He looked back at them with a spark of sadness in his eyes. They had lost hope a long, long time ago. They had waited for their lovers and they had never come. They had waited to be brought back, and had remained dead. They had waited, and they had seen the hope disappear. They had seen the way the others faded with the realization. They knew. And Jim knew it could happen.  
He chose to believe instead.  


Hope could be dangerous, but it was all he had. For the first time in his life- death- he was able to feel the joy and the warmth that the hope brought with it. And he was glad for it. If no one came, if he never went back, maybe that would be okay.  
He had a better life in his death. He had hope and he had happiness and he didn’t have nightmares or panic attacks or the feeling of needing to pull his food closer to him and eat it faster than necessary in case someone took it. He didn’t have to be wary of the adults he met that tried to care about him. There was no stress in the life of a ghost. And that was good for him.  


So maybe if he didn’t go back, it would be a good thing.


	8. Beauty and Ghostliness (Ch. 7)

He would have turned eighteen a week from yesterday. Soon enough, it became a month from yesterday, two, three. They bled together, like lines of wet ink placed too close together. He had no concept of the passing time. It was what he heard from strangers strolling through the graveyard.  


The world would be changing colors again soon. The whites and grays of Winter had given way to bright greens and vibrant blue skies of Spring and in a few more months the leaves would die. They’d turn all shades of red, orange, and yellow while they did. They’d die beautifully.  


The human race liked to believe that death was a beautiful, tragic thing. It was an end but it was also a beginning. Someone left a world behind. Kids, friends, family. There was always something someone left behind. Jim had left and no one had noticed until they got the call. He hadn’t had a funeral. There was no use honoring or celebrating the passing of something that hadn’t existed.  


The only change in the world was that there was now a beautiful white gravestone under a beautiful old tree. In a beautiful Iowan graveyard. Beauty was subjective. It was indeed in the eyes of the beholder. Jim hadn’t been beautiful. He had been an ugly ink stain on the stark white paper of the world. His garish golden hair and too-blue eyes were not beautiful. They drew attention and made people whisper how worthless he was. He had wished he could prove them wrong.  


Two years of lingering had taken their toll. He knew every face, could match every voice. He could recite the address of each person he saw. He couldn’t recite his. He knew who he was. James Tiberius Kirk. The name held no meaning to him. Not when it wasn’t used. He was a ghost. An impression. He was a dark blotch smeared on the world.  


One of the others he had talked to had told him it was the unloved who became ghosts. Winona had loved him. His father had loved him. His father had died minutes after he was born. His mother passed four years, three months, and two days after. He had followed eleven years, eight months, and twenty-nine days later.  


His father had not become a ghost. His mother had. She had been a ghost for fourteen years. He had been a ghost for two. He no longer wished to be.  


He recognized each person who passed through the graveyard. He greeted each person by name when he walked down the streets, even though they couldn’t hear or see him. When he was little, ghosts were evil spirits who haunted and floated several feet above the ground. They were the things to be afraid of, to dress up as on halloween. Ghosts were benevolent. Their feet touched the ground. They walked upon the earth they had left.  


He recognized them all. Frank, Gary Mitchell, Ben Finney, the Rogers, the Silversteins.  


He didn’t recognize the man approaching him in the coffee shop on 3rd street.


	9. The Stranger (Ch. 8)

The man was a stranger. Jim hadn’t seen a stranger since he had woken in the graveyard. Not since Pike and the others. He had never been so thankful for his invisibility as he was now.  


Except he had a feeling he wasn’t invisible.  


Invisibility, while alive, was a nuisance. While dead, it was eternal. It wasn’t something you could turn on and off. You were non-existent. You could not be seen. You could not be heard. You could not haunt. Invisibility was not something you wished to have. It was the only thing you wished to be rid of.  


The man was looking at him. He was not invisible.  


The spark of panic that thought sent through his body was surprising. For the longest time, he had wished for the solidity that life brought with it. Now, he only wished to be transparent.  


It was odd, that change of views. Strange that a stranger could make it that way.  


The man did not look friendly.  


The stranger had a coffee cup in his hand. Over-roasted and black. It was not how he usually took his coffee. Jim could see that from the slight grimace on the man’s face after each sip.  


The stranger had dark brunette hair, and stunning hazel eyes. But they looked old, like his soul carried a burden. A dark stain was smudged across it. His soul was painted black with grief and despair. It caused the scowl on his face and the furrow in his brow.  


Jim turned away. He felt mildly uncomfortable under the scrutiny.  


The man sat down heavily.  


He started and turned from the window to look at the man again.  


“Name’s Leonard McCoy.”  


The rough baritone of his voice came across as gruff, but amiable.  


“Jim Kirk.”  


And that was all it took.


	10. Surreality (Ch. 9)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took a while! i've been trying to keep the updates to twice a week but it can take a while to get into the mindset for this fic. anyway, hope you enjoy!

A coffee shop was no place to visit a ghost. It was public; it was social. It was no place to talk to a ghost.  


People would stare, they’d be afraid. They didn’t believe it what they couldn’t see.  


Jim wanted to tell that to the stranger, now introduced as Leonard McCoy. He wanted to ask if they could take a walk, if they could go outside. He wondered if that’d just make McCoy look crazier.  


“I’m not real.”  


Jim’s voice was somewhere between a low gust of wind and a whisper. Loud enough to be heard but quiet enough that it could be mistaken for the whispering of the wind in the trees.  


It was the voice of a memory. It was there one moment, remembered only for a second, and then gone. It was a broken plea for help. It stuck to the heart and the ears of all who heard it. It was haunting, ghostly.  


Leonard McCoy knew. And he stood.  


“Walk with me.”  


And he did. Jim followed the man outside and down the street. They ended up under the dogwood tree in the graveyard.  


“How long?”  
“Two years.”  
“How old?”  
“When it happened?”  
“Yes.”  
“Sixteen.”  


Leonard wished he could have saved Jim. A conversation with a broken soul left one feeling hollow.  


It was an ache that Jim felt often. It was not foreign to Leonard McCoy.  


Jim wished he could have spared Leonard the trouble.


	11. Leonard McCoy (Ch. 9.5)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a little thing i wanted to write. god, i love describing bones.

Leonard McCoy was the object of most of Jim’s thoughts in the night after they met.  


He was tall, well-built, and had thick, brown-black hair. It looked black but Jim was sure it had an almost red tinge in the sun. It looked soft. If he could have seen the color, he’d have known it was brown. If he could have felt it, he’d have known it felt like down feathers between his fingers.  


He had hazel eyes. Jim wished he could see the colors that danced in a kaleidoscopic fashion in the wide irises of Leonard McCoy’s eyes. He wished he could watch as they shone orange and green in the sun. He imagined the greens and browns and oranges that blended together like paint to make the eyes that Jim felt he could drown in.  


Jim was no artist, but he knew no one could have created anything as beautiful as Leonard McCoy.  


Leonard McCoy was nineteen, and studying to be a doctor. Oh, and he also had a girlfriend, who was three years older than him, and six months pregnant. Great.  


Jim sometimes hated being a ghost. He could only see in black and white. He could not smell or taste. He could hear. He could not touch.  


There were so many mundane things he was unable to do. He could not walk on grass or concrete. He could not swim. He could not ride a bike.  


He was invisible. He could not be touched. He could only be seen by his own kind, and one Leonard McCoy.  


He ~~despised~~ was jealous of Leonard McCoy.  


And maybe a little attracted to him as well.


	12. Memories (Ch. 10)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> per usual, short chapter. hope you enjoy!

Leonard wished to bring Jim back to life. He had asked around and contacted one- what was his name? Ah, yes. Christopher Pike.  


Christopher Pike had told him that Jim’s body was in a cryotube. In a morgue. In Iowa City. Jim did not know this. If he had known, he had forgotten it.  


Jim knew more than most ghosts. It was a simple fact that he had regained knowledge that should have been lost to him. Ghosts retained the memory of how they had died, nothing more. In Jim’s case, that didn’t seem to be quite true. He had described events to Christopher Pike that had happened much earlier in his life. The Kelvin.  


Leonard supposed that because Jim and his mother had been so close to death at the time that it made sense that he could remember what had happened. However, he could not recall if he had remembered it while he was alive. It was the day he had been born, scientifically speaking, he should not have been able to remember it. Though, scientifically speaking, ghosts didn’t exist.  


Leonard wished he knew what to do. He had seen ghosts as a child. As he got older, his mother grew worried. He was nine, and he still had imaginary friends. David McCoy simply took his son to see his paternal grandmother.  


If only he remembered what she had told him now.  


All he saw and heard was the commotion of the bucolic graveyard. Ghosts meandered through, desolate and faded.  


All the gravestones were as old and faded as the ghosts themselves. They contained decomposed bodies that had been buried decades ago. The newest addition was Jim’s gravestone. It was beautiful.  


Leonard thought it fit what he had seen of Jim.  


Jim thought it was wrong. There was no beauty in death.  


“We can put your soul back in your body.”  
“No.”  
“It’s not in the ground.”  


Jim made eye contact with him for the third time since they had met.  


“It’s in a morgue.”  


Jim held his gaze.  


“In a cryotube.”  


Jim fled.  


Leonard was left to wonder what he had done wrong.


	13. Want (Ch. 11)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason 1 AM is a really good time to write these. As always, enjoy!

He had not left because he was afraid. He had left because he felt he’d rather stay a ghost. There was enough pain now. When Leonard left, what then? He’d be on his own. Alive. He wasn’t sure he wanted it.  


But he wished to feel alive. To feel the rush of blood through his veins and the faint, ever-present beating of the heart in his chest. To feel the wind in his hair, the sun as it shined down on his body. He wished to feel the heat of a fire and the coolness of the water. He had forgotten.  


In two months, Leonard would leave. His girlfriend would have her child and they would get married and raise it together. He’d forget about the ghost. Everyone always did.  


Jim knew Leonard would have to leave eventually, and he would forget anyway. It was inevitable. Was a return to life worth giving up to spare himself of a pain that would be experienced no matter what he chose? Emotions were not dulled much in death.  


He could see Leonard from his position in the grove. Leonard had promised him life, and he had run.  


He would go back. He had a second chance. That was more than worth the pain.  


“Yes.”  
“To what?”  
“I want to be alive again.”


	14. Soul Searching (Ch. 12)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long, i've been working on a lot of other things that will probably never see the light of day, but i finally got around to this. hope you enjoy!

A soul could take many forms. Once a soul had left the body, it was tangible. It often appeared in the form of an object that was important to the person. Their favorite plant, their favorite animal.  


Occasionally, the soul would gravitate towards the person who had caused the most pain in the ghost’s life.  


Leonard thought Jim’s soul would be found near his killer. He visited the old, run-down barn, but found nothing.  


He visited the house. Still, he found nothing.  


Again, he thought. A soul reflected the person’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences throughout their life. It would be a living object.  


Leonard had found nothing but empty beer bottles and cans scattered around the dusty wood floor.  


In the barn, he had found an old bale of hay and a drawing.  


The drawing was of a single dandelion, growing out of a stone.  


He wondered if that was Jim’s soul. 

\---

He spent two months searching. Still, he found nothing. 

\---

In the graveyard, under the dogwood tree, a small, yellow flower lay hidden among the reds and the blues of the tulips.


End file.
